Adding 30 seats to the House of Commons will cost $34-million, documents show

Adding 30 new seats to House of Commons will cost $34-million

OTTAWA — It will cost Canadian taxpayers about $34.5-million to add 30 new politicians to the House of Commons in 2015, once the cost of the actual voting is factored in.

Documents prepared for Democratic Reform Minister Tim Uppal and released to Postmedia News show that it is expected to cost $19.3-million annually to support the work of the new MPs, and a further $15.2-million to hold the actual elections that will bring them into the House of Commons when Canadians next head to the polls, likely in three years.

The documents also show the government turned to the Department of Justice to review the constitutionality of the changes to riding boundaries that have led to the increase in MPs, and that it received very few letters from the public either supporting or opposing the expansion of seats.

When the plan to add the new politicians and raise the total number of MPs to 338 was first announced one year ago, Uppal said it would cost $14.8-million to increase representation in the House of Commons, and $11.6-million per election.

But he was counting only 23 new MPs, arguing that the other seven had already been accounted for under an earlier redistribution-of-seats formula.

“The figure we have been using is $14.8-million annually for 23 MPs. If we extrapolate to 30 MPs, the total would be $19.3-million …” a Privy Council Office staffer wrote to Matthew Lynch, the director of democratic reform initiatives in the PCO.

Uppal’s office sent a detailed cost breakdown to the Senate committee, showing the annual cost for an MP — including pension contributions, travel expenses, staff salaries and other office costs — is $642,701, and $505,818 per riding per election. Based on those figures, after the next election, the 338 MPs will cost taxpayers $217.2-million annually, and $171-million will be needed to run each election.

Under the Fair Representation Act, Ontario will receive 15 new seats, Alberta and British Columbia will receive six each, and Quebec will receive three additional seats in the next federal election. The government says the new seats will provide more equal representation across the country and take into account the population increases in the West and Ontario.

Critics have questioned the need for more seats when other countries have fewer politicians per capita. Research from the 2011 election flagged for the Privy Council Office suggested the population of a constituency doesn’t affect electors satisfaction with their democratic representation.

The rest of Canada keeps getting short-changed in order to keep Quebec happy

The proposal caught the attention of a handful of voters in the weeks following the announcement, including just three letters about the changes to Quebec’s seat count.

One person argued the changes would reduce Quebec’s clout in the Commons, while the remaining two felt the move unnecessarily pandered to Quebec voters.

“Did you really think that giving Quebec three undeserved seats would make the Conservative Party popular in the province? The rest of Canada keeps getting short-changed in order to keep Quebec happy,” one letter reads.

The redistribution of seats occurs every 10 years following a census to keep the House of Commons as close as possible to representation-by-population. Federal legislation does not redraw the electoral boundaries, but leaves that to independent commissions that are either currently conducting public consultations, such as in Ontario, or writing their final report, such as in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The government has said that based on population projections, there would be a further 11-seat increase in the House of Commons in 2021, the next time a redistribution exercise would take place. According to a 1996 study, the Commons chamber can accommodate up to 374 members if politicians are seated under the side galleries. The government says that under the revised redistribution formula, it would take “many more decades … for the capacity of the House of Commons to be exceeded,” reads a briefing note to Uppal.